In The Mission Song, John le Carré revisits the world of espionage that we associate with his writing. He is a master of the clandestine, the deniable, the redefinable. Bruno Salvador is a freelance linguist. His ancestry is complex, his origins confusing, but his abilities are unquestionable. By virtue of an upbringing that had many influences, he develops the ability to absorb languages. Having lived in Francophone Africa and later England, he is fluent in both English and French, as well as an encyclopedia of Central African languages. His unique gifts, considerable skills, and highly idiosyncratic methods qualify him for occasional assignments as a performer. He is trusted. He too, he discovers, is quite tight-fisted, and already has considerable experience working for those aspects of government and bureaucracy that sometimes violate the law. It is also, therefore, vulnerable. So when a new assignment – so urgent that he has to skip his wife’s party – drags him to a secret destination, he initially takes it all in stride.
But Bruno is much more than a linguist, certainly much more than a translator and, as a result of the application of conscience, much more than the interpreter his employers have hired. Your perception of language is so acute that it provides you with an extra sense, a means of interpreting the world, no less, not just a method of obtaining meaning. But he also has the intellectual abilities to identify consequences, to interpret motives. And this is where he asks to disagree with his payers.
The Mission Song is the kind of book where the reveal of the plot, beyond this mere starting point, would undermine the experience of reading it. Suffice it to say that Bruno’s task is both what it seems to be and not what it seems. Bruno’s ambivalence regarding his goals drives him to go beyond the call of duty. And by doing so, you learn more about their near-anonymous employers. But of course they learn more about him, a reality that eventually has pretty dire consequences.
The Mission Song is also a love story, or two, one going in and one going out. It is also about privilege and power, as well as their use, misuse and abuse. In many ways it inhabits territory similar to John le Carré’s Absolute Friends, but is singularly more successful, especially in the credibility of the final outcome.
John le Carré fans won’t need to be convinced. For those who have found their work less than satisfying, The Mission Song shows the author at his best, presenting a complex and highly credible plot in a deft, enlightening, informative, and yet entertaining way. His eventual message about the abuse of power is subtly embedded in the very essence of the plot and expresses it with force and relevance. We know a little more about the world in the end.
